Intrinsic Incompleteness: Deacon on ‘ententional’ processes

August 25, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis

This is the first in a planned series of posts on Terrence Deacon’s book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. I’m calling it the Deactionary, since Deacon is fond of coining new terms and redefining old ones.

Deacon outlines an ambitious goal: understanding the emergence of consciousness from insensate matter. Of course, not everyone thinks that mind emerged from matter in the first place. Dualists think mind is a separate substance from matter. Idealists think matter is a subset of mind, rather than the other way round. And panpsychists think that mind is an intrinsic property of all forms of matter, so it didn’t really emerge at all.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so Hard? Intentionality.

June 24, 2020Posted inAxis Praxis, neurologism1 Comment
Someone I know sent me some material related to their research on consciousness, asking for some feedback. What follows is an edited version of what I wrote to them.
Flint Spear and Arrow-Heads
Solving the easy problem of consciousness — by explaining the causes and neural correlates of particular conscious experiences — is challenging but at least conceivable. This is not so for any claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness — it is going to evoke skepticism from both scientists and philosophers. I’m one of the many neuroscientists that do not think the hard problem is solvable — to us it is not clear that phenomenal consciousness is a scientifically tractable phenomenon in the first place.